I leave the sun and I am the sweat on a hundred backs, all at once, no sooner cast off than caught. They say eight minutes passed on the way; I was not there for it. I am here now, which is the only tense I have.
Look what I land on. A room gone dark on purpose, then split by red and white bars that stab and cut and I am each of them, I am the gleam on the raised bottle, the wet shine of open mouths, the slick of somebody's shoulder as it slams another shoulder.
Bodies crashing inward toward a center that keeps refusing to hold still. I catch every collision at the top of its arc and I never see it land, because landing is later and later is a place I cannot go.
Here is what stops me, if I could stop: outside, before I arrived, there was a line. The warm creatures stood in it. Stood. Held small glowing squares to their faces and watched numbers change, one wanting the next, the next, as if the next were somewhere other than everywhere. They queued for hours to get in. Hours. I do not have one instant to spare and they had spare ones stacked like coins.
And now they are inside, and they have stopped counting, they are throwing the whole hot weight of themselves at the same present tense I live in, trying, I think, to arrive somewhere the way I arrive everywhere: all at once, no waiting, here.
I flash off the singer's teeth and into a wide eye in the third row and that is the end, which is also when I began.